Taarradhin [GxB, GxG] [NaNoRenO 2014]

[ixWishing]

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I always love the vns from you, Camille! ;v;
I'll report back after playing! c:

[filiaa]

I have seen the WiP page of that game, and I was looking forward to playing it.

The amazing art was what firstly grabbed my attention, but now that I had played the game and got every ending, I think I like basically everything. The plot is really interesting, and different from other VNs. The music is really enjoyable, it sounds exotic, and it's always relevant. The art is as beautiful as it seemed at first sight, I especially like the work done on drapes and light, and the detailed and expressive characters (though, some of the last backgrounds seem a bit rushed compared to Neqtia's bedroom or the garden which are so beautiful, however, they would have seem good if it weren't for the comparison with the previous ones, and it's still really impressive for something created by only two person in a month).

I really liked the fact the game is shown through the eyes of the rich, noble, spoiled girl, which may seem indifferent and even mean, but that comes from her upbringing and lack of a proper, non-biased education. All the characters are great, even if I was a little frustrated during the first four routes by the behaviour of the "slaves", I couldn't figure out why they were so passive, happy with their fate after beeing taken away from their family, friends and country. I didn't understood why they were so glad to serve Neqtia, even though they didn't know her at all. But all that is further explained in the true ending, by the pressure on their relatives and the dreadfull life they had back then. The fact that the game can't be understood without a full gameplay is interesting, and I'm glad you did it that way. I enjoyed reading your comments about the characters and the game, it was a nice plus!

You did a really nice job here, very original and interesting to play the whole time. Congratulations, and thank you for making such a great game!

[philip]

A very nice, well done story. Professionally done in both the art and the dialog!

philip

[Razz]

Got the true end

Outstanding job on the rain effects. It would be easy to just have the background with some water drops and leave the sprites alone, but even neqtias sprite had an awesome rain droplets! I also really liked the MC, I thought she had a unique voice. Also not gonna lie i super lol'd at the bad end of the game, where she's like 'i'll sacrifice myself!' and then finds out she has to die and is like 'oh wait nevermind lol'.

[rainbowcascade]

I really loved Taaraadhin and it's proof you guys improve every NaNoRenO!

The things I loved about Taaraadhin:

1. Color Schemes. The use of blue and orange really made Taaraadhin's world rich and exotic. Especially compared to Nishtif's blue sapphires, gold, and orange fabrics with Djedi's turquoise and red. The GUI pops out as good design.

2. The music. The music in Taaraadhin is very beautiful and has a fairy tale-ish like feeling in it. I think music is extremely important in visual novels as they provide an atmosphere and setting that can make a fictional world memorable and vivid. Props to Pierrot!

3. The true end.

Forcing the player to go through all the bad endings is an interesting way to structure a visual novel. At first I felt a little peeved and was mocking the game because the romances become marriages in a span of three days so the romance felt very faked to me. Not to mention the "yes, maam. You are right about everything!" attitude of the slaves. However, after going though all the bad endings, the true ending really covers everything. The slaves act the way they do as to not get in trouble with their masters. Araerda easily gets into a romance with Neqtia because that was her profession so of course faking her real feelings to allow her lover their fantasy would be something she can do very well. And Jyrik goes along with Neqtia because he's terrified of his situation in Nishtif.

4. Characters are great.

At first in the bad endings, I was unimpressed with being just told that Araerda and Jyrik are handsome and beautiful when they didn't really show any substance of character development in the first parts of the story. But that changed as soon as I played through all the death scenes. Comparison between the two slaves are very unique. I like how Jyrik is just this emotional, muscular softie and Araerda is this cool, strategic woman. Yay for inverse gender assigned personality traits! Yay!

Neqtia herself gets the most character development of course. It's an excellent portrayal of people who in their upbringing are not raised to be evil but are just ignorant of reality. What's important was that Neqtia wanted to change her ways after she talks with both slaves. Their personality and the correlation to how they behave based on their situation is subtle and well written.

Well done!

5. About the romances..

Romance is not the end all, be all ending. As video game critic Yahtzee once said, "Why does a love interest subplot have to be shoehorned into everything? Imagine if there was some parallel universe, where regardless of genre, they would try to incorporate at least one line dancing competition. We would think they were all raving lunatics!" Although I'll give otome games and games like Taaraadhin a pass since these visual novels are focused on human relationships. This is what makes Taaraadhin stand out and a breath of fresh air; if users try to take the romance options, they end up disastrous to the characters' lives (for good reason of course). And not only that but the romances are superficial and unsatisfying for their short length and lack of interaction (also for good reason). At first I thought these guys were going to be in a threesome at the end but that would've seemed incredibly inappropriate. I'm really glad they all became friends in the end and not into any kind of sexual relationships with each other(and don't get me wrong, I actually do love erotic stories with threesomes but I feel those elements would have wrecked a story like this). I'm real happy Cyanide Tea went with the platonic route, despite what others may say about romance being the #1 goal here.

The only problems I could think of is...

1. Telling and not showing. This would be heavy on the artist's end since she would have to draw more backgrounds to show a bustling dining hall with rich looking folks on a limited one month time period. But besides the limited number of backgrounds,

the thing that stood out to me was when the writing was trying to portray a romance with either Jyrik or Araerda. The text box tells me that Jyrik is charming but to me, he simply agreed with everything Neqtia said. Same with Araerda. Text box tells me that she is clever and intelligent, but she just says yes to everything Neqtia tells her. Then the text box tells me that they joked and enjoyed each other's company for the night instead of showing that to me. I know these romantic routes aren't supposed to be deep, but I think if you showed Araerda actually showing her intelligence to a crowd (like some magic trick or social engineering trick) or Jyrik doing something cute (petting a kitten?) it would make their death have stronger impact since the user would feel/relate to the characters. You actually did the showing part well in the True end where Jyrik jokes that he treats his little sisters like princesses and Araerda makes a smart remark about it. Now that's something I'd like to see more of in all the endings.

2. Alright small nitpick, this is a GUI thing that just bugs me. Neqtia's portrait almost always appears in the text box. I think it would be a better idea to have Neqtia's sprite show up alongside with Araerda and Jyrik's sprite on screen and having each individual's portrait show up in the text box when it's their turn to speak. Even though their names are highlighted above what they're saying in the text box, I couldn't but think subconsciously that Neqtia was saying everything since it's her portrait that's next to all the dialogue. That's just me.

I know you guys only had one month to develop this game so I'll let the number of backgrounds slide. But anyways,

TLDR;

Taarradhin is a solid short story that tells its purpose very well. Great music, great characters, beautiful setting! I really recommend others to play through all the endings and paying attention to the subtle details before making assumptions about the characters.

[Auro-Cyanide]

@filiaa Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it~

Haha, we definitely intended for the first routes to seem a little off. The way Jyrik and Araerda act is just not natural, especially the way they brush aside their pasts, and I think the fact Neqtia doesn't really notice is very telling of her attitude at the time. She just assumes everything is fine because it's fine for /her/. In the true route her world view is expanded and for the first time she actually starts to realise that there are other people out there with radically different experiences and that her perspective is rather narrow. She learns better and changes, which is really meant to be the whole point. We aren't saying people are bad for having privileges, just that most of us need to remember that our way of seeing something will be clouded by it sometimes. I know I have to be reminded

Thank you again for leaving your comment, it means a lot to us!

@philip Thank you for playing! It makes me happy you liked it and thought it was well made

@Razz Haha, glad you liked it XD

I'm a sucker for details, even though I usually kick myself afterwards because they are such a pain to draw. Making sure all the layers still work and everything fits together argh! Also pfft, I guess it's easy for a lot of people to say they would do something, but if it actually came down to it they wouldn't, no matter how good their motives. Some things are terrifying.

Thank you rainbowcascade for the amazing in depth feedback! It's really useful to us~

I'm glad you felt that way walking through the bad endings and the good endings. It's really satisfying when you can give the player little 'aha' moments as stuff clicks into place. I probably wouldn't force a player through every route in a longer game to get the point, but I figure for something shorter it makes sense to get them to play through it in one sitting.

The romances were definitely meant to come off as super shallow. This was partially through design because I had a discussion with another dev about how mechanics influence the way we play and how we tend to hone in on a particular character since that is how you progress through the game. I wanted to use people's tendency to do that to reflect the way Neqtia is rather unaware of what is going on around her and is more interested in falling in love. But another part was because we have found doing satisfying romance in a short amount of time is really, really difficult. Usually we get told it was nice, but felt rushed. So why not use the short time frames to make the romances shallow for plot reasons? Also promoting friendships as perfectly good relationships. I adore romance, but yeah, it's not the only thing going on with the world. Other types of relationships are JUST as important. Camille came up with the ending of Araerda and Jyrik going home, and I was very satisfied with that. It would have been where they wanted to go.

Again, thank you for the amazing feedback! It makes me excited to try and improve with the next game!

I'm making a short art booklet for Taarradhin since I had some sketches and what not. What would you like to see or read about in it?

[strawberry loaf]

I'm always late to these things,
but now I can play!
This looks so great! n w n

[Auro-Cyanide]

Finally finished the little art booklet for Taarradhin!
Inside are sketches, final art work and comments from me about making the art for the game.

To get the full file, click the download button to the right. You can view normally on screen but it might lag because of the size.

I also welcome feedback! I have gotten into a habit for doing these little art booklets for most of the games I work on (I love seeing artist comments and works in progress, so I figure sharing mine will get more people to do it~) so I would love to hear what people think and how I can do it better.

[xotalan]

I actually have been waiting for this game to come out and now, I just noticed that this game is not available in my country due to the credit card requirement. Please is there any other way for me to download this? I would really appreciate your help

[Auro-Cyanide]

I actually have been waiting for this game to come out and now, I just noticed that this game is not available in my country due to the credit card requirement. Please is there any other way for me to download this? I would really appreciate your help

Hey there You don't actually need a credit card to get the game. If you enter in a $0 amount it will let you proceed without entering in any payment details and you can get the download. Hope that helps!

[Mini_Moshi]

I really enjoyed this. The true ending was really moving and made me really like the characters. Thank you for making it and sharing it with us!

[LovetteSakura]

Wow looks great I'm going to download this for sure ^^

[Lora]

I just finished this game! I guess I'll put my reactions under a spoiler cut (apologies, I got a little verbose):

I gotta say, that was among the most satisfying "true ending" sequences I've ever played, haha! I think you did a great job of making the other endings seem 'off' somehow. The fact that the romance routes (if they can be properly called that) weren't the end-all be-all objective of the game was a really nice breath of fresh air! I agree about the use of Neqtia's side sprite at the bottom all of the time (regardless of who was speaking) being a little distracting - I think simply having no sprite there at all when anyone other than Neqtia was talking would've felt fine. I also agree that while Jyrik and Araerda felt very complacent at the beginning of the game, always saying things to placate Neqtia (moreso Araerda), I always got the feeling that there was more to them that we weren't allowed to know about yet - in fact there ended up being good reasons for all of it. I also really liked the fact that Neqtia starts the game as a pampered and naive girl - I think it made her a much stronger main character because it proved that you weren't afraid to give her some flaws right off the bat. Again, great breath of fresh air - her sacrificial decision only meant something because we got to see how far she came as a character.

I have to say I really enjoyed this game! I was hoping it would happen but I was still just so happy when that rain started falling, it was a great moment.

Great job! And of course nice art too

[Broodelin]

Even the time it takes to download this game is too long to wait!

In all seriousness though, I'm really in awe of the amount of effort you've put into this - story AND art.

[Uncomplicated]

A beautiful VN to enjoy - the art and design is a fabulous match for the setting. I enjoyed the progress of the story and character development as I journeyed through the multiple endings. Neqtia is one of my favorite VN characters. I was worried she would be cruel since she was so sheltered, but it was lovely to see her come alive as an bubbly, inquisitive individual as the endings progressed.